Although I’ve used Vienna for several versions and have over 250 feeds, I’m a bit slow on integrating RSS feed syncing with an iPhone RSS reader. Yesterday, I finally took the plunge. After many hours of hunting forums and scratching my head, I’ve finally hit on the combination that appears to work. I thought I’d write it up the best I could.

First, here are all the pieces you will need: a free Inoreader account (http://www.inoreader.com), the Inoreader plugin for your browser (see the Inoreader site), the latest version of Vienna (Version 3.1.1 :7cb6d42: running on El Capitan (10.11.3) works for me), and an Inoreader compatible iPhone or Android app. I’m using their very own Inoreader, but there are other options - again, see the Inoreader website.

1. After you’ve signed up for an Inoreader account, record your login information - login name, email address, and password - for use in Vienna and the Inoreader iOS app. Keep your new Inoreader account empty (no RSS feeds) for now.

2. Assuming you’ve been using Vienna to organize and read your RSS feeds, export the feeds as an OPML file. In the export dialog box, select the “export all subscriptions” and the “preserve group folders” options to keep your Vienna organization. Save the OPML file someplace easy to find.

3. Next, and this freaked me out, select all of your feeds/folders, with the exception of any Smart Folders, and DELETE THEM! Then “empty trash” and “reindexed database” commands under the Vienna menu just to clear out any junk that might have been left behind.

4. Now you should have a clean (no feeds) Vienna and a clean (no feeds) Inoreader account.

5. Flip over to your favorite browser with your Inoreader page loaded. I use Firefox. If you haven’t installed the browser plugin, do that now. To import your Vienna feeds into Inoreader, go to Preferences Import/Export. There you should see import options at the top of the page. Keep the Default Folder set to “none”. Use the browse button to locate your OPML file. Then hit the import button. My 250 feeds took a minute or five to load in. Don’t freak.

6. Close out of preferences and take a look at your Inoreader page. It should pretty closely mimic the folder structure you had in Vienna. Try reading some feeds and using the little refresh circle icon button thingy to manually refresh feeds. You’ll have to play around with the Inoreader preferences to get things looking like you want them, but all the feeds should be there. After you’re satisfied that everything is working in Inoreader, let’s return to Vienna.

7. In the Vienna Preferences, choose “Syncing". In that window, check the “Sync with an Open Reader server” box. Next, select “InoReader” as your server and enter “www.inoreader.com” as you server URL. Next, enter your Inoreader account email address and password. Once you’ve entered everything, click on the little global to check that your Inoreader account works from Vienna. Assuming it does, go back to Vienna. Close out of preferences.

8. If Vienna hasn’t already linked to the Inoreader account and loaded all your feeds, refresh all subscriptions and/or wait a few minutes. Sooner or later, you should have your old Vienna RSS feeds back EXCEPT they’re all loading from your Inoreader account. Cool! You can verify that any feed is coming from Inoreader by looking next to the feed icon. There should be a little cloud.

9. Finally, download the Inoreader app to your smart phone. Use your Inoreader account info to login to your account. You should see all of your feeds and be able to read them.

So, what the big deal? Well, now you can use Vienna for your RSS reader on your Mac, use the Inoreader webpage to read feeds on any public computer, and use the Inoreader iPhone/Android app to read them on your smart phone. AND THEY ALL STAY IN SYNC! SO FRICKIN’ COOL!!

Caveats: I’ve been using Inoreader for less than a week. There appear to be several issues with Inoreader and Vienna. The first one is just a bit annoying. Occasionally, Vienna will show some crazy number (>1000) of unread feeds on a folder’s icon. When you click on the icon, there are no unread feeds. The only way I got this to correct itself was restarting Vienna.

The more serious issue (but not a bug as far as I can tell) is that one can subscribe to Inoreader feeds and locally (Vienna) stored feeds at the same time. In some instances, this may be a boon. But for me, this drives me nuts. Any locally subscribed feeds WILL NOT APPEAR in your Inoreader account or on your smart phone. In order to have all of your feeds in sync, you MUST do all of your subscribing/unsubscribing from your Inoreader account. This is why having the plugin for your browser is so important. It allows you to subscribe to feeds via Inoreader. It’s as easy as a couple of clicks. So, my rule is to do all of my subscription manipulation within my Inoreader account webpage and use Vienna and any smart phone app simply for reading.

Finally, all of the apps aren’t always in absolute instant sync. There can be a lag. You can read an article in Vienna and it’ll still appear as unread in Inoreader for example. Changes can take a minute or two. In my limited testing, using the refresh command got all the feeds up to date.

For making sure things are clear : you can add new feeds to Inoreader directly from Vienna (just make sure that the "Subscribe into Open Reader" checkbox is checked), but a "local only" version of a feed will "hide" its Open Reader equivalent.

Not sure if this fits the topic(?), but on iOS I prefer the Feeddler Pro app for syncing with/reading Inoreader.(It also syncs with OldReader, Feedly and others.) They also have a free app, but I don't remember the differences ...